Chapter 8. Planning Trips
If you think shopping in general got easier when the World Wide Web arrived, wait until you see what it’s done for the travel industry. Those days of relying on a travel agent, waiting in the airline’s reservation line for them to check available flights, or even trying to decipher routes in thick, impenetrable timetables are long gone. A good travel Web site lets you look up dozens of flights at once, compare prices from different airlines, and even pick out your seat on the plane.
Many sites also guide you through booking the hotel reservations and rental cars for your trip. You can also book luxury vacations, cruises, spa trips, and other getaways—and often save money doing so over the Internet. So if you’re planning your next vacation or merely dreaming about it in the distant future, buckle up and take a spin through this chapter to see where to go when you want to go.
Booking Tickets and Reservations
People plan trips in different ways. Some spend weeks doing meticulous research on the area’s attractions, and then schedule events right down to the nanosecond. Other travelers just wake up one Friday, decide to skip work and start the weekend early, and buy a ticket to the cheapest interesting destination—allotting an hour to pack and get to the airport.
No matter how you like to travel, though, there’s a Web site that can keep up with you. With the advent of the e-ticket—a ticket receipt and boarding pass issued at the airport—you don’t even have to wait for an old-fashioned paper ticket to arrive in the mail. You just get to the airport, swipe your credit card through a kiosk at the airline’s check-in counter (for I.D. purposes only), and collect the boarding pass that’s printed on the spot. Then you show your government-issued ID (like a driver’s license or green card) when you check your bags at the counter and go get in line at the metal detectors.
Buying a plane ticket on the Web is simple—specify the airports you want to use, plus the dates and times of travel. You can indicate how many people are traveling together, which airlines you prefer, and what seating class you’d like.
The travel site brings you a page showing all the flights that match your chosen travel dates and times. If you find a flight you like, follow the Web site’s instructions for booking the flight. You can usually select your own seat from a seating chart—a clickable map of the actual model of plane you’ll be riding. For the flights that still serve food, you can choose meals with special dietary preferences like low-sodium, vegetarian, or meals that conform to religious observations.
Tip
Excited about picking your own seat? First consult the SeatGuru at www.seatguru.com, where you can see seating charts and floor plans for just about every type of airplane. SeatGuru colorcodes the especially good and bad seats on each plane—which ones are noisy because they’re over the engines, which ones have extra legroom—and provides basic information about the aircraft, onboard amenities, and other useful data.
Booking hotel rooms and rental cars works roughly the same way. At hotels, you can specify things like how many beds you want and whether you want a smoking or non-smoking room. Rental car companies let you select things like the vehicle size you need and any necessary infant or child car seats as you book online.
Yahoo, MSN, and AOL (Chapter 2) have their own little travel corners, often with special deals and discounts. But if you don’t hang out on portal sites and want to go site-seeing around the Web before you pack the sunscreen, read on.
TripAdvisor
Travel magazines can make just about anyplace sound sophisticated and glamorous, but sometimes you can get more useful advice from people who paid their own money to go there. If you’re wondering if that tiny motel in Gettysburg is a dump or want to find out whether a visit to the Biltmore Estate on your upcoming trip to Asheville would be a good way to spend the day, visit the TripAdvisor site at www.tripadvisor.com.
With four million reviews from people who had something to say about 200,000 hotels, restaurants, and attractions, you can get unadorned, unbiased advice from the site.
TripAdvisor is more than a message board full of posts and photos praising the food at a Kansas City barbecue joint or complaining about broken air conditioning at the roadside motel in Reno. It offers tools to help you plan your trip, too.
On TripAdvisor, you check out a city’s most popular hotels by price, location, and rating, check pricing across a bunch of separate hotel-booking sites at once, and sign up for customized email newsletters bringing you the latest from your chosen destination before you leave. If you’re in the early stages of thinking about your next vacation (which for many people starts the day they get back from their last one), spending some time with the TripAdvisor site can let you know what to expect the next time you hit the road.
Tip
Many airline Web sites now include flight-tracker pages that show a flight’s current progress on the ground or in the air; you just need to know the airline and flight number to get a map of the plane’s location and details of its whereabouts. (Actually, if you have a Mac, press F12 to see a Flight Tracker widget in the Dashboard feature that does the same thing.) This is helpful if you’re the one picking up at the airport, because you can see if the flight has been delayed and plan your run to the Arrivals lane accordingly.
Travelocity
Owned by Sabre Holdings, a long-time player in the travel industry that built the first computerized reservations system in the 1960s, the Travelocity Web site at www.travelocity.com is one of the best-designed and easiest-to-use travel sites online (Figure 8-1).
To tempt you further into traveling, the Travelocity home page has an ideas section with articles outlining themed or regional trips.
Travelocity powers a few other sites as well, including AOL Travel and the AARP Passport service, which offers deals and discounts for members of the American Association of Retired People.
Along with flights, hotels, and cars, you can book cruises, train tickets in Europe and Canada, and full vacation packages to near and distant lands—including Disneyland. If you’re one of those get-up-and-go types, Travelocity regularly has a number of deals for cheap, last-minute trips for this weekend or next. If you’re really on the hunt for a deal, sign up for the site’s RSS feed (Section 5.5), which sends out an update to your Web browser or feed reader program if the fares to your favorite places drop by 20 percent or more.
Expedia
Expedia (www.expedia.com) is another big all-purpose travel site. (Because it was founded by Microsoft and later spun off into its own company, Expedia is also the booking muscle behind the MSN Travel Service.)
As its name suggests, Expedia’s an expedient way to book a flight, hotel, and rental car all at once and potentially save a chunk of money.
Once you sign up, the site remembers your personal info (including frequent travel companions) and stores your trip details in its My Itineraries section. If you fly to the same place on a regular basis, Expedia saves completed reservations in My Itineraries; if you liked the airline route and hotel, you can use the same ones again by clicking the “Repeat trip” button (Figure 8-2, circled) and just changing the dates for your next go-around.
The site offers plenty of packages like ski trips, Caribbean cruises, and romantic getaways; you can easily add special tours and attractions (like Broadway tickets or a tour of Mozart’s Salzburg). Expedia also offers a link to maps and driving directions right on its main page, so you don’t have to wander off to another URL to see where your hotel is or how to find it.
Tip
Online travel services act as the middlemen between you and the airline, hotelier, and car rental place. It’s a good idea to print—or save to your hard drive—all receipts and reservation confirmations. Have these documents available, on paper or on your laptop, in case there’s a computer glitch or mix-up at one of your destinations.
Orbitz
The Orbitz site at www.orbitz.com was started by several major airlines (American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, and United) who came together to do their own version of a Web-based travel service. The site can find flights on hundreds of airlines, rooms in thousands of hotels, and transportation from a dozen different rental car places.
You can compare several hotels onscreen or search for lodging by specific amenities like a pool or business center. The hotel-search feature lets you pinpoint your hotel by brand or proximity to a tourist attraction.
Orbitz has built part of its reputation on its customer services. For example, if you sign up for the company’s Care Alerts, you’ll get electronic updates of traffic conditions, weather advisories, and other things to watch out for via email, cellphone, pager, or wireless palmtop.
Orbitz has its own RSS feed (Section 5.5) of daily travel deals for those afflicted with severe wanderlust and has its own package deals for baseball-game trips, Valentine vacations, and other themed getaways.
Kayak
As the box in Section 8.1 makes clear, not every airline shows up on the big Web travel sites. Fortunately, sites like Kayak (www.kayak.com) make sure you don’t miss any of the possible flights.
Kayak is one of the best travel search engines. It tracks fares across hundreds of different airline sites and other online travel sites. It can quickly find, say, 400 different possibilities for an April trip from Newark to London.
When you get your results, the site tells you which ones are direct and which flights have stops; dragging the sliders on the page (Figure 8-3) lets you narrow down the list of possibilities based on the time of day you’d like to take off or your top ticket price.
Once you find a flight that looks good, click it; Kayak sends you to the site selling the seat so you can buy it there. You can search across multiple hotel sites just as you can with flights, and even compare rental car fees all at once.
Kayak offers trip ideas, email alerts, and RSS feeds (Section 5.5) for hot deals, and a link to specials—both foreign and domestic—for a variety of travel budgets and moods.
Last-Minute Deals
If you’re not fussy about when or where you go, you can find even bigger, better bargains on the Web. Certain discount travel sites specialize in selling off empty airplane seats, unreserved rooms, and unrented cars at the last minute—at rock-bottom prices.
Priceline
The original “Name Your Own Price” travel site, Priceline (www.priceline.com) can save you up to 40 percent on flights and hotels—if your travel schedule is flexible.
If you need to leave at a precise time, Priceline may not save you much money. But if you’re not locked into a schedule, you can get some nice deals when you punch in your airport information, the day you want to travel, and the maximum amount you’re willing to pay.
Priceline crunches through its database trying to find flights that match all your criteria. The results may offer more layovers than you’d like, but your bank account may not mind. (Of course, you’re not limited to those cheap seats; you can get more direct flights at specific times if you’re willing to up the ante.)
Like the other travel sites, Priceline directs you to hotels, cruises, cars, and package deals. Its Pricebreakers deal page specializes in limited-time offers, mostly from big hotels and resorts looking to fill up empty rooms on short notice—a great way to get luxury accommodations at low, low motor-lodge prices.
Hotwire
If Expedia is a name-brand department store full of travel opportunities, then Hotwire is its discount store at the outlet mall. Like Priceline, Hotwire (www.hotwire.com) requires some flexibility on your part, but offers up to 60 percent off hotel rooms and 35 percent off air fares. Last-minute flights purchased within 7 days can be up to 50 percent off.
Hotwire finds hotels and flights that match your requests, but doesn’t tell you where you’re staying or who you’re flying until after you make your purchase. This setup may be a little suspenseful for some people, but it’s what allows Hotwire to find the lowest prices from the hotels and airlines that really want to sell off unused inventory.
If you don’t like that idea of flying blind, Hotwire also displays the lowest published price from its partners, too.
Travelzoo
The point of Travelzoo (www.travelzoo.com) isn’t to book trips; it’s to get descriptions of the very best deals of the moment, generated not by a database but by human researchers who hand-pick the goodies. Once you find an appealing offer, you can buy the trip from the site that’s actually selling it.
Travelzoo also acts like the other travel discounters described here. When you search for a flight or hotel on the site’s Super Search page, Travelzoo presents you with a list of links to other sites selling what you want, like Hotwire, Priceline, or even the airlines themselves.
If you like to travel inexpensively, you may want to sign up for the Travelzoo Top 20 newsletter, which comes to you by email each Wednesday. It rounds up the best travel sales and specials that week so you can make plans before the weekend.